Ancient Carthage and the Punic Wars

FOR OVER A CENTURY, two civilizations fought three wars for control of the western Mediterranean, and the outcome was not inevitable until near the very end. Carthage, founded by Phoenician settlers on the North African coast of what is now Tunisia, was one of the wealthiest and most powerful cities of the ancient world. Rome was expanding aggressively. The two powers were eventually going to collide, and when they did, the conflict produced some of the most dramatic military history of the ancient world, including a general who is still studied in military academies and a defeat that Rome came closer than it has ever admitted to not surviving.

Carthage at Its Height

Carthage was founded, according to tradition, in 814 BC by Phoenician settlers from Tyre, led by a princess named Dido who later became the subject of Virgil's Aeneid. The traditional founding date may be somewhat early, but Carthage was certainly well established by the 7th century BC and dominant in the western Mediterranean by the 6th century BC.

At its peak, Carthage controlled a commercial empire that covered the North African coast from modern Libya to Morocco, Sardinia, the western portion of Sicily, the southern coast of Spain, and scattered trading posts along the Atlantic coasts of Africa and Europe. The city itself, situated on a peninsula in what is now the Bay of Tunis, was one of the largest in the ancient world, with a population estimated at 400,000 or more. It was protected by massive walls, a natural harbor supplemented by an artificial military harbor, and a formidable navy.

Carthaginian wealth came from trade, particularly in the metals of the western Mediterranean: silver from Spain, copper from Sardinia and Cyprus, tin from Britain via the Phoenician trade routes. The Carthaginians also controlled the Strait of Gibraltar and collected tolls from ships passing into the Atlantic. Their commercial networks extended across the known world.

Their military, however, was different from Rome's in a fundamental way. Carthage relied primarily on mercenary soldiers, hired from Spain, Numidia, Gaul, and elsewhere, commanded by Carthaginian officers. This gave them access to large, diverse forces but created a recurring vulnerability: mercenaries who were not paid on time did not fight, and mercenaries who felt cheated sometimes changed sides or rebelled. The catastrophic Mercenary War of 241-237 BC, fought immediately after the First Punic War, nearly destroyed Carthage from within before it could face Rome again.

The First Punic War

The First Punic War began in 264 BC over Sicily, the large island that sits between Africa and Italy and was at the time divided between Carthaginian and Greek-founded cities. A local conflict between Sicilian city-states drew in both Rome and Carthage, and what started as a proxy dispute became a 23-year struggle for control of the island.

Rome had no navy at the start of the war. Carthage had one of the best in the ancient world. The Romans solved this problem with characteristic pragmatism: they allegedly found a stranded Carthaginian warship, used it as a template, and built a fleet of 120 ships in two months. They then added a tactical innovation, the corvus, a spiked boarding bridge that could be dropped onto an enemy ship and locked it in place, turning a naval battle into something more like land combat, at which Roman soldiers excelled. At the Battle of Mylae in 260 BC, using this device, Rome defeated a Carthaginian fleet and captured or sank over 50 ships. Rome had just won its first significant naval battle against one of the greatest naval powers of the age.

The war dragged on for two decades, consuming enormous resources on both sides. Rome lost fleets to storms as well as to Carthage. Carthage struggled to defend Sicily and fund the war simultaneously. The end came when Rome built yet another fleet, its fifth in the war, and defeated the Carthaginian navy at the Battle of the Aegates Islands in 241 BC. Carthage could no longer supply or reinforce its forces in Sicily and sued for peace. Sicily became Rome's first overseas province. Sardinia and Corsica followed shortly afterward when Carthage was distracted by the Mercenary War.

Hannibal Barca and the Second Punic War

The Second Punic War is one of the most dramatic conflicts in ancient history, and it is almost entirely the story of one man. Hannibal Barca, son of the Carthaginian general Hamilcar Barca who had fought Rome in Sicily, is said to have sworn an oath of eternal enmity toward Rome as a child. Whether or not the oath was literally taken, the sentiment was genuine. Hannibal spent his early career in Spain building a Carthaginian power base. In 218 BC he provoked Rome into declaring war by attacking the Spanish city of Saguntum, which was under Roman protection.

Then, rather than waiting for Rome to bring the war to him, he brought the war to Rome. He led an army of approximately 60,000 soldiers, including 37 war elephants, across the Pyrenees, through southern Gaul, and across the Alps into northern Italy. The Alpine crossing in late autumn cost him perhaps a third of his army to cold, altitude, and ambushes by local tribes. He arrived in Italy with a reduced force, having lost most of his elephants, and proceeded to defeat every Roman army sent against him for the next several years.

The Battle of the Trebia in 218 BC. The Battle of Lake Trasimene in 217 BC, where Hannibal ambushed a Roman army of 30,000 in a fog, killing most of them in less than three hours. And then Cannae in 216 BC, the battle that is still studied as one of the greatest tactical masterpieces in military history.

At Cannae, Hannibal faced a Roman army of approximately 85,000 men with a force of around 50,000. He deliberately weakened his center and strengthened his flanks. The Romans attacked the center and pushed it back, advancing into what became an encircling movement by the Carthaginian flanks. The Roman army was compressed into a mass too dense to fight effectively and methodically slaughtered. Between 50,000 and 70,000 Romans died in a single day. It remains one of the bloodiest single days in military history. Rome lost more citizens at Cannae than at any point in the Second World War.

Why Hannibal Lost

Despite his victories, Hannibal never took Rome. He campaigned in Italy for fifteen years without capturing the city. The reasons for this are debated by historians, but the central problem was strategic rather than tactical. Hannibal could defeat Roman armies in the field. He could not replace his own losses, could not besiege Rome without siege equipment he did not have, and could not break the loyalty of Rome's Italian allies, most of whom stayed with Rome despite his victories.

Carthage did not send him significant reinforcements or supplies. The reasons for this are partly political, as Hannibal's family had enemies in Carthage, and partly strategic, as Carthage was fighting Rome in Spain and Sicily simultaneously and could not concentrate resources on Italy. His brother Hasdrubal eventually led an army across the Alps to join him in 207 BC, but the army was intercepted and destroyed at the Battle of the Metaurus River. Hasdrubal's severed head was thrown into Hannibal's camp. He understood then that he was alone.

Rome's strategy, articulated most clearly by the general Fabius Maximus, was to avoid pitched battles with Hannibal and wear him down. While Hannibal was in Italy, Roman armies under Scipio Africanus were conquering Carthaginian Spain, cutting off Hannibal's supply base. Hannibal was recalled to Africa in 203 BC to defend Carthage itself. At the Battle of Zama in 202 BC, Scipio defeated him. It was the first time Hannibal had lost a major battle. The Second Punic War ended with Carthage paying enormous reparations, surrendering its navy, and losing Spain.

The Third Punic War and Delenda Est Carthago

Carthage recovered economically over the following decades to a degree that alarmed some Romans, particularly the senator Cato the Elder, who famously ended every speech in the Senate regardless of the topic with the words "Carthago delenda est," Carthage must be destroyed. In 149 BC Rome found a pretext in a Carthaginian military action against Rome's Numidian ally and declared war.

The third war was not a contest between equals. Rome had overwhelming military superiority and Carthage knew it. The Carthaginians surrendered and handed over their weapons as demanded. Then Rome added a further demand: the city of Carthage must be abandoned and rebuilt inland, away from the sea. This was a death sentence for a maritime trading city. Carthage refused. The city's population, using domestic metal, their own jewelry, and cutting women's hair for bowstrings, manufactured weapons to defend their walls. The siege lasted three years.

When Scipio Aemilianus finally breached the walls in 146 BC, the fighting continued house to house through the city for six days. Survivors, perhaps 50,000 out of a former population of hundreds of thousands, were sold into slavery. The city was systematically demolished. The story that Rome salted the earth afterward is probably a later invention, but the destruction of the physical city was thorough. The site was left desolate for over a century before Julius Caesar and then Augustus founded a Roman Carthage on the same location.

What Was Lost

The destruction of Carthage removed one of the major powers of the ancient world and left Rome without a serious rival in the western Mediterranean for generations. It also destroyed whatever written culture Carthage had produced. The library collections, the historical and religious texts, the accounts of their own history that Carthaginians must have written, are gone. What we know about Carthage comes from their enemies: Romans who had fought them and Greeks who had competed with them commercially. The picture is inevitably partial and not always fair.

Hannibal himself died in exile around 183 BC, having served various eastern kingdoms as a military advisor after leaving Carthage. When Roman ambassadors arrived demanding his surrender, he took poison rather than be captured. He was approximately 65 years old. He had spent his entire adult life at war with Rome and never stopped being a problem for them, even in exile. Rome's insistence on pursuing him to his last refuge in Bithynia tells you something about how much they still feared him even then.

The story of Carthage is, in the end, the story of what gets erased when one side wins completely. Hannibal's tactics survive in military textbooks. Carthage itself survives only in the records of the people who destroyed it.